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This slanderer induced Siegfried to banish Genofeva straightway, and so the lady fled from the castle to the neighbouring forest of Laach, where a little later she gave birth to a boy.
'Now, dogs! cried the Baron, 'the health of the night! and swell your lungs, for I'll have no cat's cry when Werner's bride is the toast. Monk or no monk's leave, she's mine. Ay, my pretty one! it shall be made right in the morning, if I lead all the Laach rats here by the nose. Thunder! no disrespect to Werner's bride from Pope or abbot.
The countess often made a pilgrimage to this house of God, to thank Him who had caused her tears to be turned into joy. Then a day came when her corpse was carried into the forest, and was buried in the church. Even now in Laach, the wanderer is shown the church and the tombstone, also the cavern where she suffered so much. Thus the name of St. Genovefa will last to all time.
What the business was which had brought him from his own monastery, is not stated; but he had also been asked to do some recruiting for the Benedictines at Laach. The Abbot there was nephew of the Prior at Niederwerth, and had taken this opportunity to extend his quest further afield.
Would they have let the lads of Andernach float down cabbage-stalks to them without a shy back? And why? All because they funk that brigand-beast Werner, who gets redemption from Laach, hard by his hold, whenever he commits a crime worth paying for.
On the Founder's Day, 1501, he entered upon the novitiate, which was followed a year later by his profession; and in 1503 he was sent to Trèves and ordained priest. In the course of his numerous writings Butzbach gives sketches of many of the inmates of Laach. The senior brother at the time of his arrival was Jacob of Breden in Westphalia, a man of strong character and force of will.
The dressing done, they marched up the pass of Tonnistein, and took a deep draught at the spring of pleasant waters there open to wayfarers. Arrived at the skirts of Laach, they beheld two farmer peasants lashed back to back against a hazel. They released them, but could gain no word of information, as the fellows, after a yawn and a wink, started off, all heels, to make sure of liberty.
One cause of dissension in monasteries at this period was the existence of an unreformed element among the monks; though in Butzbach's time it had probably disappeared at Laach. Ever since the Oriental practice of monasticism spread into the West, Christendom has seen a continual series of endeavours towards better and purer ideals of human life.
After a few years he came into trouble with his master for laziness and truancy, and received a severe beating; his mother intervened and got the master dismissed from his post, and Butzbach was removed from the school. Butzbach's manuscripts from Laach are now in the University Library at Bonn, but have never been printed. I have used a German translation by D.J. Becker, Regensburg, 1869.
He was a pious, honest man, and at the time when he wrote his autobiography at the request of his half-brother Philip, he was already a monk at Laach.
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